Endless Space is a turn-based 4X strategy game, covering the space colonization age in the Endless universe, where you can control every aspect of your civilization as you strive for galactic dominion.

July 30

It's been crazy here these past few days, with the iPad announcement for Dungeon of the Endless, the Endless Legend: Shadows expansion and Gamescom approaching. The Endless mysteries have almost all been solved now and you have unlocked the ENDLESS SPACE 2 website and trailer.

Thank you so much for your hard work and enthusiasm: it was a real pleasure to follow your progress on this treasure hunt through this thread and on our social networks. Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter and invite your friends for exclusive in-game goodies! :)

March 4

Fixed the Don't Even Think About It achievement: "create a custom faction with -195 points or less, and win a game with it on Endless difficulty" (the achievement would trigger with a custom faction with -100 points points or less)

Reviews

“Endless Space is smart, polished and intelligent game of countless permutations. Its strength lies in how carefully and how cleverly it's balanced, as well as how it rewards all kinds of playing styles. We haven't seen a strategy game quite like this in a while.”
8/10 – IGN

“In case it's not yet clear: go for it. If you are an experienced player, go for it. You are rather inexperienced with the 4X genre and it frightens you? Go for it.”
9/10 – FactorNews

“For a first game, it is surprisingly complex, demanding and motivating.”
82% – GameStar

Extra Content

About This Game

This galaxy is ancient, and its first intelligent life was the civilization we call the Endless. Long before our eyes gazed upon the stars they flew between them, though all that remains of this people is what we call Dust. A substance found scattered or in forgotten temples, it once gave powers to admirals and galactic governors. The galaxy will belong to the faction that can take control of the Dust and uncover its secrets…

A Born Leader: Guide one of eight civilizations as you strive for galactic dominion. Will you control the entire galaxy through subtle trade and diplomacy, explore every corner of the universe to find powerful artifacts and resources, overwhelm other civilizations with your advanced technologies, or destroy your enemies with massive armadas?

Endless Discoveries: With hundreds of star systems to explore, different planet types, luxuries and strategic resources to exploit, the mysteries within the Dust to master and a host of strange scientific phenomena to deal with, the player will have no lack of challenges. Hire heroes to become fleet admirals or system governors and discover five hero classes and their unique ability trees and specializations.

Space Opera: Experience Endless Space with state-of-the-art graphics and interface, switch between strategic battle decisions and long-term planning. Optimize each fleet for epic battles around contested stars. Create the perfect combinations from dozens of unique ships per civilization. Customize your ship with modules, armament, engines and special mods. The player has a plethora of choices of how to best destroy or dissuade his enemy.

Take on the Universe: Play against up to seven opponents and build up – or break – alliances at will. Discover an innovative and dynamic simultaneous turn-based gameplay. Permit instant jump-in for your ongoing online games. Define your own custom civilizations and confront the ones created by your friends.

Endless Replayability: Control every new game’s scope, from a quick match-up to an endless war. Generate an infinity of random galaxies where every start begins a new adventure. Modify the size, shape, density, age and a lot more to create your ideal galaxy. Choose from different victory conditions and adapt your strategy on the fly.

The short of it: This game is really good, BUT ONLY WITH THE EXPANSION! DO NOT BUY AND PLAY THIS GAME NAKED!

Unlike a lot of 4X games, Endless Space is more about building your empire than about developing your colonies or really fighting wars. Not that you won't fight wars, the AI is usually vicious enough to wait and plot and it will build up an overwhelming force based on your existing military might before waging war on you. And it WILL do that. Every single chance it can, unless it can't, it will do that. Never think it won't, since it has no reason not to.

We'll get more into that later, but right now let's focus on the empire-building. Building up the empire is the primary focus of this game. Oftentimes if you look at too little at a time, you'll tunnel vision yourself into a corner when you should be keeping yourself as distant as possible. A prime example of this is expressed in happiness. The morale of a system and its subsequent production bonuses are NOT more important than the overall happiness of your empire. After all, a 15% production bonus across 4 stars is better than a 30% bonus in just one. If, when settling a new system, you have a planet with lots of production, or a planet with a high amount of happiness-boosting, you pick the one that makes your empire happy, or you lose the game.

Now then, let's talk about war. War is problematic in this game because A) it's inevitable, and B) it's boring. The game takes a very hands-off approach to combat and in the vanilla game technology is both everything and a linear arms race. The guy with the most ship tonnage and the best weapons will always win. You can employ tactics cards, but these will only have a minimal impact on the outcome. This leads to a very boring experience, and can force you into certain types of tech progression and thus certain modes of gameplay. To deviate from established doctrine is to lose in the vanilla game.

DO NOT PLAY THE VANILLA GAME. Instead, do yourself a favor and get the Disharmony expansion. The Disharmony expansion does away with about 75% of the weapon-tech in favor of just four generations of guns. Each is a sizable improvement over the last generation, and keeping up the with the AI is definitely important, but with tactics, ship design, aimpoint selections, and formation management you can steal victory from the jaws of supposedly assured defeat.

Endless Space encourages you to use your distant veiw not to mess with the minutae of your own empire, but rather to mess with the other guys. Through trade, trade routes, blockades, invasions, explorations, treaties, and wars you are charged to take away the choices of the enemy for as long as possible while you improve your own choices. How you do this is entirely up to you, and Endless Space: Disharmony actually allows you quite a bit of wiggle room on how you do it.

Smooth 4X gameplayEndless Space plays great with smooth 4X gameplay. it plays a lot like a Civilization game, with the player having to manage your government, your tech, your military, and foreign relations.

Strategic Combat In Endless Space instead of directly controlling battles you choose your battle strategies. like EMPs, Missile Barriers, and the such. choosing the right battle strategy can help you win against even a larger fleet.

Epic Thematic Battles once you've chosen your battle strategy the only thing to left to do is sit back and watch the fireworks. getting to see your epic fleet destroy (or be destroyed) is just great.

Lots of factionsEndless Space features 12 factions with their own lore, game art, and space ship design. to add to that you can also create your own faction with their own traits.

Custom fleetsin Endless Space you can choose what weapons and systems your ships have, this means you can make ship designs for certain purposes like planet invasion or fleet carrier.

Heroesa slight RPG element to Endless Space are heroes. heroes can be assigned to systems and fleets giving bonus. they also get XP as time goes on and get better traits.

What Endless Space did wrong

UI is a little confusingthe Endless Space UI can be a little confusing and they don’t really do good job of explaining everything to you.

AI is not too smartThe AI in Endless Space is not that smart. they will attack you even if you greatly outnumber them. also if you get a too high tech score they attack you “out of fear of your advancement” so basically they get afraid when you have enough power to beat them, so they attack you. on their own. i wish the AI would join together to take you down if they think you've gotten too powerful.

"Come, my friends,'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. . . .To sail beyond the sunset, and the bathsOf all the western stars, until I die."

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The universe with it’s endless amounts of galaxies, stars and planets was born out of what we call “the big bang”. It took billions of years before the first life was given and further billions for the new rulers of space to conquer every star they could reach: The Endless. They traveled through wormholes, became masters of time and space, built outstanding monuments and structures and oppressed every lifeform that stood in their way, all with the help of a special gift called dust. The only ones who could make them fall were the Endless themselves with inner conflicts and arrogance. Millions of years later other empires arose from the stars. The Endless were gone but their technology, wisdom and Dust is still there, waiting for new conquerors. Which faction will dominate the others with science, war and dust? Hopefully yours. ----------

It all starts with your chosen nation. May it the aggressive bird-like Hissho, the mechanical Automatons or the old human Imperials, they all come with positive and negative aspects that fit differing playstyles. Colonizing your first planet afterwards can be a tough choice. Planets differ and thus do the resources they produce. What you should keep in mind here is FIDS, standing for Food, Industry, Dust and Science. Basically, these four get your planets populated and fed, build ships and structures, offer the possibility for doing research and pay your running costs for ships, planetary improvements and heroes. Improvements can be portals for faster travel, refineries or habitats, just to name some out of a huge amount ES offers. Heroes are specialized commanders who can be attached to starsystems and fleets to further improve certain aspects like production or offense. They get XP, level-up and cost more while doing so. Better ships and improvements need more research and cost more Dust. See, it is the well known cycle you have to bear with. What makes it even more difficult sometimes are random events that can be a blessing but also a plague for the whole empire.

Having established yourself, there is room for more difficult tasks. First, acceptance. Planets, taxes and other effects influence your nation’s happiness. The higher the taxes, the higher the dust outcome. But who wants to pay taxes? People will likely start to get lazy and work less. It works the other way around too. Less taxes, more resources. Next task: luxury ressources. Once your scientists know how to deal with them, you gain the opportunity to build better ships, planetary improvements and use them as trading goods. Trading leads us to task 3, diplomacy. Venturing into the unknown will make you meet new friends. Or Foes. Fight or feed them? Living in peace means building trade routes for dust and science, luxury resources and even full researches. An alliance keeps your back when war is raging against You. But why even trading when there is the chance to OWN your friends starsystems? --------

Talking about war makes it necessary to talk about the combat system. Since the whole game uses a turn based system you might expect this happening for combat, too. It somewhat has “turns” but once your fleet started the battle, there is no way to stop nor influence it. Every battle is divided into 5 phases, were these are again divided into turns. Roughly Explained: Remember turns as a term that got used in Baldur’s Gate where attacks and effects were happening in a specific amount of time? Take this, mix it with scissor-rock-papers referring to bullets, lasers and rockets and their defensive counterparts and add some tactical influence via abilities, used as “cards” ingame. These cards have to be chosen before the battle starts, thus forcing you to have a close look at your opponent. If you like battles à la Sins of a Solar Empire you will get disappointed. Fights in general last about 1 min if you choose to watch them and tend to look repetitive after a while. Still: Choosing the right weapons and armour can make your fleet win against even way stronger contenders. --------

Let’s have a look at graphics and sound. Whilst the tactical overview tends to look spartanic, does a zoom make this game shine. Planets, Moons, Stars, everything looks nice and realistic and every faction looks unique in terms of ships. Although battles aren’t the most exciting part of the game, they still do have some nice explosions and fleet animations to offer. The UI can be overwhelming at the start but having played for 2-3 hours I already felt myself at home. To those complaining about it in other reviews: There is a tutorial that nicely shows and explains everything. My recommendation here: Take your time, read carefully. It is turn-based.

The soundtrack fits just perfectly into the setting of an unknown and unexplored galaxy. Sometimes thrilling, most of the time relaxing, I never stopped it while playing for hours.-------

Story?Lore! It is everywhere in this game and it needs to be mentioned here. Every planet, every ship, research, hero, resource...every single fact comes with a nice and well written explanation and makes this game shine. Most of the facts are fictional though but still written in such a reasonable manner that one might want to look up a lexicon. Keep in mind: There is no single-player campaign, yet there is enough content to fill hundreds of hours if you choose to play every different faction. Everything happens in scenarios that can be set up before starting, like choosing difficulty, number of AIs, nations, single- or multiplayer. Multiplayer feels great and allows players from all over the world to play without having any ping-loss - the advantage of a turn-based game.

Big Text, Quick Facts:

Pro

Turn-Based 4x at it`s best - gotta manage them all!

Various factions to choose from, each with their own unique background story

Dozens of different planets, ships, researches, heroes and random events

Wonderful graphics that show details on ships, planets and star systems

Satisfying diplomacy and trading

Rich fictional yet reasonable setting full of lore and text

Multiplayer allows to form alliances with - or against - your friends

Chilling Soundtrack

Con:

Overwhelming start (Hint: Read the Tutorial!)

Combat feels short, uncontrolled, even luck-depending sometimes and once you found the right answer for enemy ships, they are meat

No single-player campaign

Summary:

Endless Space. A game that uses the 4x in its description, roughly translated as explore, expand, exploit and for the sake of all: exterminate. Resource management, diplomacy, research and war, perfectly arranged for turn-based strategists who love to play at their own pace whilst planning for future turns.

One can not ignore that combat lacks the thrill other space strategy titles offer in exchange for strategical choices but graphics, depth and lore is what compensates and entertains for hours.

After 30 hours (3 games) worth of Endless Space I feel like I've exhausted its options. Maybe that isn't so but after a first runthrough learning the systems I was able to beat the game on easy on my next attempt in about 250 turns. Moving up to normal added little challenge. The game simply ended more quickly because the AI forced my hand earlier on. Strategy games thrive in that thin line between being too simplistic to have lasting appeal and being too complex to learn in the first place. Sadly, Endless Space is both difficult to learn and easy to master. It's the exact opposite of what a game of this sort should be.

That said I still had a lot of fun with Endless Space. I liked the addition of hero units to space based TBS Game. It's something common in fantasy titles but not something I had experienced in this specific type of strategy game. The combat to me was pointless. I found a handful of cards that worked and just used them in almost every battle. The AI didn't adapt to this strategy and I found myself easily winning every battle without having to fight it manually.

The main issue with the pacing of the game is that once you reach the point where you are close to victory you are so insanely powerful that there is little tension. In my first match on the normal difficulty level I built 4 of the 5 wonders needed to win the game and left the fifth one with a couple turns left to build and enough money to finish it instantly if I needed a quick victory. Meanwhile I also researched every single item on the tech tree but the science victory. I made numerous diplomatic agreements for no reason, getting my score very close to 100, and built up a massive army capable of destroying all of my opponents with ease. Eventually an opposing team got too close for comfort to reaching an economic victory, forcing me to finish my final wonder. But the point is that at the very late point in the game I was at, any victory method would have been viable. I was toying with my opponents. This is something I would expect to be able to do after a hundred or more hours of practice or on an easy difficulty setting. But it seems to me that unlike the best turn based strategy games, focusing on one area (say scientific research) does not have to hinder your abilities in other areas. That takes away from the strategy of the game.

So while I enjoyed my three matches of Endless Space, I felt by the end that I had nothing more left to see. I could play as one of the more unique races. I could up the difficulty and see if I could beat a cheating AI, but neither of those prospects excite me greatly. I still play Galactic Civilizations 2 over half a decade after it was released. And in my mind it inarguably remains the greatest sci-fi 4x game on the market.

Simply put this game is pretty high up on my "steam regrets" list and I don't know why. It starts off with fairly amazing graphics, however, things quickly go downhill. The whole combat system is essentially pick a card by making an educated guess about what card the computer picked... and then you get to watch a 30 sec encounter of the ships shooting at eachother. After maye the first dozen fights these become increasingly painful to watch as you realize that if you wanted to watch a movie you have no control over netflix is probably the cheaper and better option. Essentially all of the combat and strategy are done in what you research and how you equip your ships (kindof cool for the 2 minutes it takes) of course by the late game it doesn't really matter what you do equipping wise as all ships are essentially paper airplanes flying around with nukes. (whoever has the most ships wins)... I'm going to quit writing before I get to the completely happiness (you have very very little control over) based economy as this much anger is unhealthy.

TLDR; Deceptively disappointing game. You do tons of work for very little actual affect on the game.